《美食祈禱和戀愛》Chapter 26 (52):真的丟了,我的箱子

Still, I go to the post office a few times to try to track down my box, to no avail. The Roman postal employee is not at all happy to have her phone call to her boyfriend interrupted by my presence. And my Italian—which has been getting better, honestly—fails me in such stressful circumstances. As I try to speak logically about my missing box of books, the woman looks at me like I'm blowing spit bubbles.

儘管如此，我仍去了郵局幾次，試圖追蹤我的箱子，卻徒勞無功。那名羅馬郵局員工很不高興和男朋友的通話被我的出現打斷。而我的意大利語——已經愈來愈好，說老實話——在這種緊急狀況下辜負了我。我嘗試條理分明地說明遺失一箱書，這女人看着我的樣子就像我在吹泡泡。

"Maybe it will be here next week?" I ask her in Italian.

“也許下禮拜會寄到這兒？”我用意大利語問她。

She shrugs: "Magari."

她聳肩說：“Magari。”

Another untranslatable bit of Italian slang, meaning something between "hopefully" and "in your dreams, sucker."

又是一個無從翻譯的意大利俚語，意思介於“但願如此”和“做你的白日夢，蠢蛋”之間。

Ah, maybe it's for the best. I can't even remember now what books I'd packed in the box in the first place. Surely it was some stuff I thought I should study, if I were to truly understand Italy. I'd packed that box full of all sorts of due-diligence research material about Rome that just seems unimportant now that I'm here. I think I even loaded the complete unabridged text of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into that box. Maybe I'm happier without it, after all. Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?

Eat, Pray, Love

呵，或許這是最好的結果。我現在甚至記不起一開始在箱子裏裝了哪些書。肯定是我認爲自己若想真正瞭解意大利，就該讀的一些東西。我在箱子裏裝滿各式各樣應當用功研讀的羅馬研究資料，如今既已身在此地，這些東西似乎不再重要。我想我甚至把整冊愛德華•吉本（Edward Gibbon）的《羅馬帝國衰亡史》的完整版裝進箱子裏。或許沒有它，我會比較快樂。畢竟人生如此短暫，我果真想把我在世間餘下的九十分之一的日子，花在閱讀吉本上嗎？